Fox News Sanitizes Family Research Council?

The right wing has seized the shooting at the Family Research Council as an opportunity to denounce the designation, by the Southern Poverty Law Center, of the FRC as a "hate group" - a designation that has been used by some media in reporting the shooting. Naturally, as the right's media arm, Fox News has provided a platform for those who defend the FRC. Michelle Malkin did her usual verbal histrionics about the unfairness of labeling, as a hate group, a group that supports traditional values. Both Megyn Kelly and Bill O'Reilly provided a platform for FRC President, Tony Perkins, to say that the SPLC provided "license" for the gunman to attack. On none of these shows was there any attempt to articulate the basis for the SPLC's categorization. The viewer is left with the impression that the FRC was unfairly maligned because of its position on gay marriage when the reason for the SPLC classification is that it "has knowingly spread false and denigrating propaganda about LGBT people." That wasn't mentioned on any of the segments. Fox News, "fair & balanced?"

“One of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the ‘prophets' of a new sexual order.”-1999 FRC pamphlet, Homosexual Activists Work to Normalize Sex with Boys.

“While activists like to claim that pedophilia is a completely distinct orientation from homosexuality, evidence shows a disproportionate overlap between the two. … It is a homosexual problem.”— FRC President Tony Perkins, FRC website, 2010

My best guess is that they think empowering the FRC will help their odds. The problem is that the group is too high profile, so everybody knows what they do, and why.

Personally, I condemn the shooter, but the only person in that building who gets anything positive from me is the guard he shot. A large part of this is that people who know him said he doesn’t agree with (or even like) the FRC, they’re just where he got assigned. So he took that bullet for people he didn’t even like.